In 1994, almost one million ethnic Tutsis were killed in the genocide in
Rwanda. In the aftermath of the genocide, some of the top-echelon Hutu
officers who had organized it fled Rwanda to the eastern Congo (DRC) and
set up a new base for military operation, with the goal of retaking
power in Kigali, Rwanda. More than twenty years later, these rebel
forces comprise a diverse group of refugees, rebel fighters, and
civilian dependents who operate from mountain areas in the Congo forests
and have a long and complex history of war and violence. While media and
human rights reports typically portray this rebel group as one of the
most brutal rebel factions operating in the eastern Congo region, Hutu
Rebels paints a more complex picture.
Having conducted ethnographic fieldwork in a rebel camp located deep in
the Congo forest, Anna Hedlund explores the micropolitics and practices
of everyday life among a community of Hutu rebel fighters and their
families, living under the harshest of conditions. She describes the
Hutu fighters not only as a military unit with a vision of return to
Rwanda but also as a community engaged in the present Congo conflicts.
Hedlund focuses on how fighters and their families perceive their own
life conditions, how they remember and articulate the events of the
genocide, and why they continue to fight in what appears to be an
endless conflict. Hutu Rebels argues that we need to move beyond
compiling catalogs of atrocities and start examining the ordinary life
of combatants if we want to understand the ways in which violence is
expressed in the context of a most brutal conflict.
